This summer I had the opportunity to travel to Vancouver to be a student volunteer at the SIGGRAPH 2018 conference. I was hesitant to go, as it meant cutting my internship at Liberty Mutual a week short and paying lots of money for an international plane ticket and a room at a hostel for a week. The one other person from my school who was accepted could not go because her boss would not let her take a week off from work, which meant I’d be going alone. But I decided that SIGGRAPH would be too good an opportunity to pass up, so I decided to fork over the cash and go. That was probably the best decision I’ve made all year.
I have never seen so many people who shared my interest in computer graphics. At my school, there are about twenty students who regularly attend our local University of Illinois SIGGRAPH chapter meetings. But in Vancouver, there were over sixteen thousand people, all connected to computer graphics in one way or another. That's just crazy to me. And, everyone there was super friendly. It reminded me of freshman year of college where you could talk to anyone and they be glad to talk about their experiences and life story. I made a few good friends during the week and I think they’ll be lifelong friends who I’ll will stay in contact with and hopefully see next year for the conference.
New Technology
Real-time rendering was one of the “hot topics” of the convention. With Nvidia demonstrating its newest generation of GPUs, it seemed that everyone wanted to show off the realisticity of scenes that could be rendered in real-time. I still think that it is a few years off for the common consumer, as much of the real time rendering demonstrations were done on computers that had over $50,000 worth of hardware. The other big topic was using machine learning to speed up various aspects of the computer graphics pipeline. A cool application of machine learning that was discussed was using convolutional neural networks to perform anti-aliasing instead of the traditional anti-aliasing techniques. The future is bright for the world of computer graphics technology.
I also loved seeing the new virtual reality hardware on display. Some of it seems like it will be important for the next generations of the VR headsets. There was one exhibit that had an adaptive lens that made looking through a VR headset much less eye-straining, especially when looking at objects that are “close up” in the virtual world. That technology will be in the newest headsets for sure.
Computer Animation Festival
But, probably the best event that I attended was the Computer Animation Festival. It was an event where they showed several committee-picked short films in the large auditorium of the conference building. The one that I liked the best was probably One Small Step by Taiko Studios--it was a very touching the story of a young girl who achieved her dream of becoming an astronaut. There were some, however, that erred on the weird side. For example, 1 Mètre/heure by French studio Cube Creative was about snails dancing on a plane. Weird topic, but it was beautiful to watch. A few others did well at displaying the newest technologies like real-time rendering in game engines instead of the typical movie production pipeline.
Overall, after having a great week at SIGGRAPH, I’m going to push to get a lot of people from our local University of Illinois SIGGRAPH chapter to apply. It was one of the best weeks of my life, and I want others to have the same experience that I had. I’ll definitely be going next year.
